Precedent and Control in Investment Treaty Arbitration

This Article\u27s thesis is that, although arbitrators in investment treaty arbitration are not formally bound by precedent in the same manner as common-law judges, there is an informal, but powerful, system of precedent that constrains arbitrators to account for prior published awards and to stabilize international investment law. This informal system, however, imperfectly supports the relevant policy goals. It is additionally being tested by an increasing diversity of arbitrators, who are themselves facing pressures from investors and host States to meet conflicting demands. This Article proposes that the structure of investment treaty arbitration can absorb such stresses if: (a) the system of precedent is clarified and publicized to enable the global community to appraise awards and the arbitrators who render them; (b) investors and States exercise care in their selection of arbitrators; and (c) the community of international arbitrators exercises sufficient informal self-regulation and self-selection. This thesis is developed in three Parts. Part I discusses the concept and policies of precedent as it has developed in courts. Part II examines the extent to which these policies apply to investment treaty arbitration, and whether investment treaty arbitration has a system of precedent that promotes the relevant policy goals. Part III makes recommendations to further refine the system of precedent in response to emerging global trends, such as the economic growth of the People\u27s Republic of China and an increasing diversity of arbitrators from both developed and developing States

Renegotiating the Odious Debt Doctrine

Following the United States\u27 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq,\u27 the US government argued that the successor government in Iraq was not responsible for Iraq\u27s Saddam-era debt under the purported doctrine of odious-regime debt. This purported doctrine apparently excused--by operation of law--all successor regimes from repaying debts that were incurred by oppressive predecessor regimes. Here, Cheng presents three-part response regarding the purported rule that oppressive debts of a predecessor government do not bind its successor

Precedent and Control in Investment Treaty Arbitration

This Article\u27s thesis is that, although arbitrators in investment treaty arbitration are not formally bound by precedent in the same manner as common-law judges, there is an informal, but powerful, system of precedent that constrains arbitrators to account for prior published awards and to stabilize international investment law. This informal system, however, imperfectly supports the relevant policy goals. It is additionally being tested by an increasing diversity of arbitrators, who are themselves facing pressures from investors and host States to meet conflicting demands. This Article proposes that the structure of investment treaty arbitration can absorb such stresses if: (a) the system of precedent is clarified and publicized to enable the global community to appraise awards and the arbitrators who render them; (b) investors and States exercise care in their selection of arbitrators; and (c) the community of international arbitrators exercises sufficient informal self-regulation and self-selection. This thesis is developed in three Parts. Part I discusses the concept and policies of precedent as it has developed in courts. Part II examines the extent to which these policies apply to investment treaty arbitration, and whether investment treaty arbitration has a system of precedent that promotes the relevant policy goals. Part III makes recommendations to further refine the system of precedent in response to emerging global trends, such as the economic growth of the People\u27s Republic of China and an increasing diversity of arbitrators from both developed and developing States

Multiscale Adaptive Representation of Signals: I. The Basic Framework

We introduce a framework for designing multi-scale, adaptive, shift-invariant frames and bi-frames for representing signals. The new framework, called AdaFrame, improves over dictionary learning-based techniques in terms of computational efficiency at inference time. It improves classical multi-scale basis such as wavelet frames in terms of coding efficiency. It provides an attractive alternative to dictionary learning-based techniques for low level signal processing tasks, such as compression and denoising, as well as high level tasks, such as feature extraction for object recognition. Connections with deep convolutional networks are also discussed. In particular, the proposed framework reveals a drawback in the commonly used approach for visualizing the activations of the intermediate layers in convolutional networks, and suggests a natural alternative

Competitive Relationships Among Potato Production Areas in Northeastern America

Agribusiness,

DIFFERENCE IN RETAIL AND FOODSERVICE SEAFOOD BUYERS IMPRESSION OF AQUACULTURAL PRODUCT

Consumer/Household Economics,